A First Stab at Some Eurycosmic Principles

aka "Principia Eurycosmica" ;-) ...

In this chapter I
will enumerate some core principles that I believe have value for
understanding the core nature of the cosmos we exist in. The
treatment will be abstract, somewhat sketchy and mostly rather dry.
Subsequent chapters will elaborate and extend various of these
points, in some cases in a more colorful and exciting way.

In this initial
chapter I have opted to sacrifice superficial excitingness for
simplicity and clarity, but make no mistake – on a conceptual level
this is rather bloody thrilling stuff! I mean – what is being
undertaken here is nothing less than a rational, formal model of the
broader universe, broad enough to encompass not only conventional
physics and psychology but also altered states of consciousness,
reincarnation, life after death, beings from other dimensions,
psychic phenomena and lots of other funky stuff human beings haven't
imagined yet! In this chapter it will all seem stiff and a bit
quasi-mathematical, but in subsequent chapters as the book unfolds,
we will explore more of the intuitive richness of the various
phenomena this framework is able to model.

Principle 0: In
dealing with subtle matters like the nature of mind and reality, it
is best to avoid absolutist attitudes, and to consider concepts and
entities as they appear in the perspective of some particular
observer or some particular class of observers.

This is both a
meta-principle for discussion and cognition, and a statement about
the nature of the universe. While this subjectivist/relativist
approach has a long history in philosophy, it has also arisen
recently within quantum physics, in the form of the “relational
interpretation” of quantum mechanics. In the relational
interpretation of QM, one can only only sensibly talk about the state
of some system after specifying the observer with respect to which
the state is considered as relative. This seems to me the best
approach to take, not only in the context of QM but more broadly.

As another
meta-principle too obvious to give a number, I would like to
emphasize that even though I have chosen the fancy word “principle”
in the enumeration of my core ideas here, I could just as well have
used “hypothesis” or “semi-educated guess.” I am probing
here into aspects of the universe that none of us humans, myself
included, really understand very well. This is all quite uncertain,
and I expect that in future once we (or our descendants or creations)
understand this stuff better, these writings will read like a messy
mix of insight and confusion. That's OK – it's great to see one's
ideas obsoleted via incorporation into a deeper understanding.

Without further ado,
then, here are some ideas I have come to suspect are key for
understanding the cosmos we live in. To some they will seem radical,
to others almost obvious (although oddly put).

Principle 1: The
physical spacetime continuum in which we perceive ourselves as
living, while in our normal waking state of consciousness, is best
viewed as a subset of a larger realm.

For lack of a better
name, I will call this larger realm “the eurycosm.” The use of
a singular “the” for “the eurycosm” is not intended to be
philosophically loaded; the eurycosm as I understand it has a great
deal of multiplicity to it, and could just as well be viewed as “the
field of eurycosms” or similar.

I tend to think of
the eurycosm as “the world beyond our physical universe.” On
the other hand, someone might claim that if the eurycosm has any
valid form of existence, it must be “physical.” To me this is an
uninteresting kind of semantic dickering. When I think about
eurycosm as “trans-physical”, what I mean is that:

there seems no
reason to assume that the eurycosm has a dimensional structure like
our physical reality does, nor to assume that it obeys basic tenets
like the conservation of energy (nor even that physical “energy”
is a useful concept in a eurycosmic context)

there seems no
reason to assume that the eurycosm has even the limited, approximate
variety of “objectivity” (observer-independence) that our
everyday physical world often appears to have

the extent to
which the eurycosm can be understood by methods of repeatable
experimentation and rational analysis is unclear

Of course, quantum
mechanics portrays the microworld as “trans-(everyday folk
physics)”; and other radical physics brainstorms like Wheeler's
pregeometry or even something as mainstream as string theory, also go
far beyond everyday physical reality. So it wouldn't be an insanely
large stretch to consider the eurycosm as I describe it here to be a
somewhat vaguely stated, a bit more out-there than usual speculative
physics theory. That is not, however, how I think about it.
Intuitively, I think of the eurycosm as being cognitive as much as
physical, but as significantly transcending the pattern-complexes we
normally associate with either cognitive or physical dynamics.
Thinking of eurycosmic structures and dynamics as a kind of extended
physics may be helpful for some purposes, but may also be misleading.

It is certainly
possible that eurycosmic modeling as I'm pursuing here may be useful
in the search for new “grand unified” physics theories. My
strong guess, however, is that even a much more refined version of
the eurycosmic model presented here will end up actually BEING a
grand unified physics theory in any currently recognized sense. I
think the eurycosm is just a fair bit slipperier than our physical
universe, and isn't going to be modelable with the precision and
completeness we want from a physics theory.

There seems more
potential in the exploration of models that live, in a sense, between
current physics and eurycosmic modeling. Could one replace string
theory, loop quantum gravity and so forth with some sort of
higher-dimensional physics theory that reflects key aspects of the
eurycosmic model presented here, but also gives rise to observed
physical data in a precisely calculable (whether analytically or via
simulation, or some combination thereof) way? I tend to think so,
and my speculations about causal webs could be interpreted along
these lines. But there is a lot of work to be done to turn those
speculations into something that could be tested against empirical
data or even used to do calculations (and I don't seem to be finding
time to do that particular work, given everything else on my plate).
Perhaps causal web theory will get fleshed out to fill the niche
between current physics and eurycosmic modeling, or perhaps something
new and different will emerge and play this role in a manner not now
envisioned.

Principle 2:
“Consciousness”, in the sense of raw awareness, is best
understood as a quality that can be an aspect of any entity in the
eurycosm.

This is a form of
“panpsychism” extending beyond our spacetime continuum into the
proposed broader realm. The word “consciousness” is
problematic, and some might want to call this kind of raw awareness
by the term “proto-consciousness” instead. The structured,
deliberatively self-aware consciousness of human minds has many
aspects that are not intrinsic to basic, raw consciousness.
However, I will use the word “consciousness” to include both
basic raw consciousness AND more complexly structured forms of
consciousness such as human consciousness.

Principle 3: The
eurycosm can usefully be viewed as displaying various forms of
mathematical structure, e.g. topology, geometry, order relations.

This is not to say
that such mathematical notions can fully capture or explain the
nature of the eurycosm. It doesn't seem logically impossible that
they can do so, but it also would seem folly to commit to such an
Principle at this time. In fact the nature of the eurycosm appears
sufficiently rich to elude any such complete capture, i.e.

Principle 4: With
respect to any mathematical, scientific, verbal or other model one
may construct, the eurycosm will always have some substantial
“remainder” that eludes this model.

The very likely
incomplete nature of any effort at modeling the eurycosm, however,
does not imply the futility of such initiatives. Rather, the
construction of mathematical, scientific and conceptual models is an
important strategy for coming to grips with the universe we live in
and navigating its mysteries.

Principle 5:
Entities within the eurycosm may sometimes be construed as existing
in a relationship of containment to each other. That is, we may
consider composite entities in the eurycosm, which contain other
entities within them.

Without getting all
formal about it, this means we can talk about sets and groupings of
entities in the eurycosm as being parts of the eurycosm themselves.

Next, we need to
start talking a bit about observations.

The notion of an
“observer” is subtle at the foundational level we are addressing
here, since observers themselves are generally best viewed as
complex dynamical systems – e.g. I, Ben Goertzel, am a different
observer right now (sitting in a taxi to the Shenzhen airport, a bit
blurry from an insufficient night's sleep, typing the first version
of this text) than I was ten seconds ago, 15 minutes ago (when I was
somewhat wrapped up with being annoyed at an intransigent Chinese
border control official), 2 hours ago (when I was peacefully sleeping
next to my wife), or 40 years ago (when I was more ambivalent between
a scientific materialist view and the kind of perspective presented
here).

In view of this sort
of complexity, it is better to start with observations and with the
simplest possible sorts of “observers”, and then build up to more
complex observers and types of observation.

Principle 6: An
“observation” can be understood as construing: some set of
entities in the eurycosm (being treated as the “observer”), and
some (possibly different) set of entities in the eurycosm (being
treated as the “observed”). An observation has a certain
directedness to it, which is implicit in the distinction between the
observer and the observed (which is a meaningful distinction even in
cases where the observer and the observed are the same set).

For some purposes we
can think of an observation as an “arrow.” Note also that the
“set of entities” referred to in Principle 6 could be a single
entity.

Like everything else
in the eurycosm, an observation has a certain aspect of consciousness
associated with it.

Observations thus
construed are about as “atomic” as one can get without tying
oneself in conceptual knots. They have a basic aspect not possessed
by “observers” like, say, “Ben Goertzel” or “the modern
scientific community” or a particular laboratory instrument as
considered over the lifespan of a complex experiment. Sometimes we
may also want to think about more complex sorts of observers. But
when things get confusing, it's often better to bring the discuss
back to the foundation of individual observations.

Still we have to
confront the complexity within observations:

Principle 7: Many
observations have hierarchical internal structure, in the sense that
they contain other observations.

That is: an “arrow”
of observation can contain multiple sub-arrows.

And we have to
confront the complexity of associating multiple observations with
larger entities:

Principle 8: A
“complex observer” O, like a person or machine or social group, is
a collection of entities S, together with a set of observations O1 in
which subsets of S serve as the “observer” portion

According to this
broad notion of a complex observer, pretty much any collection of
entities can be a complex observer. But in most cases, there is no
use to consider a random collection of stuff as a complex observer.
To distinguish the meaningful complex observers from the meaningless
ones, we need some notion of “coherence.” But to build up to
that we need some more preliminaries.

First we need to
associate some basic qualities with entities in the eurycosm:

Principle 9: From
the perspective of a given observer, within a given composite act of
observation, some entities in the eurycosm iare going to appear
“simpler” , more “surprising”, or more “intense” (i.e.
more the subject of focus) than others.

In mathematical
language, this implies that we can identify simplicity,
surprisingness and intensity as three different (observer-dependent)
partial orderings on the eurycosm.

The term “intensity”
is introduced here as a way of talking about attention. Intensity
is the degree to which something appears as the focus of attention
within a certain observation. Since intensity is a degree rather
than a binary variable, we can then think about “distributions of
intensity” across the elements of an observation.

One can also think
about the distribution of intensity across all the elements of all
the observations associated with a complex observer. Note that the
observations associated with a certain complex observer may form a
complex network of overlaps, and that for instance x might be more
intense than y within O1, whereas y might be more intense than x
within O2, even though both O1 and O2 exist within the same complex
observer. This is not necessarily problematic; the notion of a
complex observer does not imply any sort of logical consistency.
Although there are notions of coherence that are useful to consider
in the context of complex observers, which we will discuss below.

Principle 10: One
entity A can be thought of as a “representation” of another
entity B (from the view of complex observer O) if intensity of B
probabilistically implies intensity of A, across multiple
observations associated with O.

Basically, this
says: A represents B if when B is intense, A is also intense … at
least to some degree. This is a very primitive notion of
representation – basically just association. But it is proposed as
the foundation of more complex forms of representation, much as a
simple sort of observation is proposed as the founcation of more
complex observers.

Principle 11: P
is a pattern in S, from the perspective of O, if P represents S (to
O) and P is simpler than S (to O). That is, “a pattern is a
representation as something simpler.”

A pattern may be
associated with a quality of “notability”, basically gauging how
much simpler P is than S, and how strongly P represents S. This
quality has been called “pattern intensity” in some of my
previous writings, but here I am using “intensity” to mean
something else, so I'm introducing the term “notability.”

Notablity will often
lead to intensity, but this isn't exclusively the case.

Principle 12: The
surprisingness of an observation, is positively related to the
notability of the patterns contained with the observation.

I am not defining
surprisingness as some sort of formulaic combination of pattern
notabilities, because I think that experientially surprisingness and
notability are a little different. Maybe this is splitting hairs too
thinly, but I'm trying to be careful here.

Having built up our
model of the eurycosm to the point where we have a concept of
pattern, a lot of other concepts now come along for the ride. I have
put a lot of work into developing a theory of mind founded on the
concept of pattern. In my previous writings, e.g. “The HiddenPattern” (free PDF version here), we find concepts like mind, intelligence, emergence,
creativity and so forth conceptualized in terms of webs of pattern.
Some of the discussion there, if interpreted word for word, is
implicitly founded on materialist assumptions and doesn't port
immediately in exact detail to a eurycosmic context. However, the
core ideas given there are not tied to materialism at all, and can
all be ported to a eurycosmic context just fine, with just a little
bit of creativity.

For instance,
“emergence” is construed in pattern-theoretic terms as collective
pattern. A pattern P is emergent between S1 and S2, if it is a much
more notable pattern in the set {S1, S2} than in the individual
entities S1 and S2 considered separately. This concept can be
captured by some quite basic mathematics.

To appreciate the
sorts of issues involved with porting a pattern-theoretic concept
away from materialist assumptions, consider the concept of
intelligence. Among other aspects, it assumes a notion of time. But
in a eurycosmic perspective, one doesn't assume any particular time
axis as a foundation. Rather, one has to view intelligence as
existing relative to a certain bundle of local time axes (a concept
to be introduced just below).

So let us deal with
this little matter of time....

Principle 13:
When an observation contains two overlapping sub-observations, it is
sometimes the case that one of these is more surprising than the
other. This difference can be viewed as a kind of gradient of
surprisingness.

A surprisingness
gradient between sub-observations is a kind of “surprisingness
arrow”, different in nature from the “observation arrows”
introduced in Principle 6.

Principle 14:
Chaining together multiple surprisingness arrows, contained within
various acts of observation, results in what may be thought of as a
“local time axis”.

Given the
potentially complex internal structure of observations, sometimes one
local time axis may branch off into multiple axes, leading to a kind
of branching tree (or rather, directed acyclic graph) of local time
axes. A subset of such a branching dag may be considered as a
“local time bundle.”

Given a local time
bundle T, one can group elements of the observations related to T
into sets. For instance, my dog Pumpkin, as I conceive her, begins
as a large set of entities involved in a large set of different
observations made at different locations along a time axis or bundle
that exists relative to me as a complex observer. Pumpkin has a
certain coherence as a set of entities, which can be partially
captured by noting that there are many notable patterns in this set
of entities – these patterns comprise her “Pumpkin-ness” as a
set of regularities in my stream of observations.

So we can say:

Principle 15: A
persistent entity S, relative to a local time bundle T, may be
conceived as a set S of entities within observations associated with
T, so that there are highly notable patterns emergent in S

We can then look at
relationships of “elementary causality” between persistent
entities. A persistent entity, within each observation that it
intersects, is associated with a certain intensity distribution. One
can then ask: along the time-bundle T, is there a pattern that
changes in S1 tend to slightly precede changes in S2? Or vice versa?
If the former, we may say there is an elementary causal relation
between S1 and S2. We can draw a “pre-causal arrow” between S1
and S2.

Then we can ask --
from the perspective of the observer O, is there any other S so that
there is a pre-causal arrow from S1 to S, and another pre-causal
arrow from S2 to S? Can the pre-causal arros from S1 to S2 be
explained in terms of chains of pre-causal arrows leading from S1 to
S2 through other entities? If not, then from O's perspective, we
can draw a causal arrow (not just pre-causal) from S1 to S2.

A persistent entity
can be viewed as a series of time-chunked sub-entities. For
instance, if one chunks time by days, one obtains a Ben Goertzel on
23/03/16, a Ben Goertzel on 24/03/16, etc. One can create
time-chunked sub-entities based on eurycosmic time-bundles, and one
can draw causal arrows between these time-chunked sub-entities. In
doing so one gets an (observer-dependent, as always) causal web.

Principle 16: The
network of causal arrows between time-chunked sub-entities of
persistent entities, plays a significant role in the eurycosm. This
network is the elemental form underlying what we think of as “space”;
we may consider it as “proto-space” in the same sense that local
time-bundles are a kind of proto-time.

The physical space
modeled in current physics has a lot of structure beyond this kind of
network structure. But what is proposed is that this is the
essential structure underlying space: two time-chunked persistent
entities S1 and S2 are “adjacent to” each other in proto-space if
changes in S1 appear to cause changes in S2 directly, without
intervening factors. And proto-space consists of the network of
adjacencies between time-chunked persistent entities.

Principle 17: The
patterns that we observe in our physical spacetime-based reality,
correspond to analogout patterns in portions of the eurycosm outside
our physical spacetime. In these analogous patterns, we have local
time bundles in place of a physical time axis, and proto-space in
place of a physical dimensional space. Furthermore, there is a
correlation between The similarity between the patterns in our
spacetime and analogous patterns in other portions of the eurycosm,
is itself a significant pattern in the eurycosm.

With this Principle,
we have now gotten beyond abstract quasi-mathematical metaphysical
philosophy and started saying something concrete about the eurycosm.
Namely: the stuff we see around us in this world, is in some ways
reflected in other parts of the eurycosm.

But the dynamics of
the eurycosm are not restricted to the dynamics that physicists and
other scientists have identified in our physical universe. The
eurycosm seems to display other sorts of dynamics as welin l. A key
example, I suggest, is what Charles Peirce called “the tendency to
take habits” and Rupert Sheldrake has called “morphic resonance”:

Principle 18: A
characteristic of the eurycosm, or at least of large portions of the
eurycosm within which humans have tended to exist, is that
the distribution of pattern notability tends to be more peaked than one
would expect from naïve assumptions of probabilistic independence
among different entities. That is, once one observes a certain
pattern P in one part of a set S that is part of the eurycosm, this
surprisingly-much increases the probability of observing that pattern
P in some other part of S. Further, this phenomenon seems to occur
for sets S that are defined as spatiotemporal regions (though not
only for such sets S). Generally, one seems to have a certain set of
patterns that occur a bit more than one would expect, and the others
that occur less.

In the case of a set
S defined as a spatiotemporal region, this notability distribution
phenomenon takes the form of “morphic resonance” or “patterns
tending to continue.”

Due to this kind of
phenomenon, the impact of eurycosmic dynamics as perceived within the
spacetime continuum may appear to be “nonlocal” in nature. The
probability distribution of events at one spot in the spacetime
continuum, may appear correlatively or causally related with the
probability distribution of events at some far-distant spot in the
spacetime continuum. This may seem counterintuitive from
perspectives within the spacetime continuum, but yet within the
eurycosm the dynamic relationships in question may be direct and
straightforward. Pathways of eurycosmic causality may be quite
short, even if they connect events that are classified within the
spacetime continuum as occurring at very distant spots in spacetime.

Fairly similar logic
underlies various models of psi theory in terms of higher-dimensional
space, such as have been proposed since the middle of the last
century. Once one gets used to higher dimensional thinking, it's
easy to see how an ESP signal that appears in our spacetime continuum
as “spooky long range information transmission”, could be a short
hop through a higher-dimensional space. The eurycosmic model
proposed here, however, provisionally models the eurycosm as a
nondimensional space with a weaker sort of topology and geometry.

Of course, these
“containing eurycosmic space” ideas are still very general and
don't tell you much about exactly what kinds of phenomena we're going
to see in the context of ordinary human life. It is clear, however,
that they do open the door for classic psi phenomena such as ESP,
precognition and certain types of psychokinesis; and also for
variants of reincarnation, survival-after-death, and related
phenomena. What we have here is not a detailed explanation of these
“anomalous” phenomena – there is a long way from these ideas to
any sort of detailed explanation. What we have is something more
abstract but still, I think, at least somewhat worthwhile: a
rational, systematic model of the broader universe (the eurycosm) in
which phenomena like psi, survival and so forth can sensibly be
expected to exist. In later chapters we will explore eurycosmic
treatments of the specifics of various phenomena of this nature.

Getting back to the
specific proposal of peaked notability distributions: It's worth
noting that analogous peaked-distribution phenomena occur in human
brains. For instance, similarities as assessed in the brain often
get distorted this way – so that very similar entities get their
similarity boosted, and moderately similar entities get their
similarities decreased. In the brain this sort of phenomenon is
often a consequence of so-called “on-center, off-surround” neural
connectivity patterns – in which a neuron stimulates other neurons
near it, and inhibits other neurons far away from it. There is a
decent analogy between these neural-net phenomena and the much more
abstract setting we are considering here. But in fact one doesn't
need inhibition per se to get the needed dynamics – all one needs
is a preference for spreading attention to nearby entities, and a
fixed (or roughly fixed) amount of attention to go around.

Principle 19:
When a notable pattern has high intensity according to some observer,
it often occurs that other related notable patterns get high
intensity too – and to a higher degree than would be implied if
intensity were proportional to notability. This is one root of the
peaked notability distribution which leads to “morphic” type
dynamics.

Now we are getting
at the particular peculiarities of the interplay between our physical
universe and the enclosing eurycosm. The eurycosm has many dynamics
occurring within its shifting emerging timelines, but one of the more
significant ones is a morphic resonance type dynamics embodied in the
statistics of pattern notability. Our physical universe has its own
dynamics, embedded in but more specialized than the broader dynamics
of the eurycosm.

From a eurycosmic
point of view, our spacetime continuum and an individual human mind
are two examples of the same phenomenon: an autopoietic,
self-reinforcing, self-creating pattern system. That is: an
interlocking system of observations, each one involving an observer
within the system observing other observers within the system. The
peaked distribution of pattern notability encourages the emergence
and perpetuation of such systems.

Each autopoietic
pattern system has its own particular dynamics, and these can be more
significant in governing the evolution of a persistent entity within
the system, than broader eurycosmic dynamics. But still the broader
eurycosmic dynamics are there, ready to peek through and influence
things.

Principle 20:
When a phenomenon within an autopoietic pattern system is so complex
with respect to a certain persistent-entity observer that strongly
overlaps with that system, that the observer cannot possibly predict
it (consistent with the patterns that characterize the observer as a
persistent entity), then the outcomes regarding that phenomenon tend
to be biased via the distribution of pattern notability in the
eurycosm. In this way, the “morphic” distribution of eurycosmic
pattern notabilities manifests itself within the autopoietic pattern
system.

According to this
principle, for instance, the morphic dynamics of the eurycosm
generally stays out of the way of the different, more rigid dynamics
that characterize our ordinary spacetime (considering our spacetime
continuum as an example of an autopoietic pattern system existing
within the eurycosm). But when a phenomenon is simply too complex or
too well obscured to be observed by a certain complex observer, this
is where the broader dynamics of the eurycosm “leak through.”

Among the
complex systems to which these morphic dynamics apply are human
beings:

Principle 21.
Individual human minds existing in our spacetime continuum, have
analogues outside our physical universe in the eurycosm. The
dynamics of the eurycosm-analogue of a physical-universe human mind,
sometimes leaks into the physical universe and affects the dynamics
of the analogous human mind, or other associated human minds.

So in this
perspective, individual human minds – like you and me – are to be
viewed as having (metaphorically speaking) one food in this physical
spacetime continuum, and one foot elsewhere in the eurycosm. Since
raw consciousness is viewed as an ambient aspect of everything in the
eurycosm, this means that an individual human consciousness is partly
inside and partly outside our physical universe.

I have referred to
“mind” above but of course, there is no rigid boundary between
human mind and human body. From a physical spacetime perspective,
the mind of a system like a human being is effectively viewed as the
fuzzy set of patterns associated with that physical system, which
includes patterns at varying levels of abstraction.

Exactly which
patterns in our physical universe are reflected in the outside
eurycosm to which degrees, is not at all clear to me at this point in
time. We need a far better science (or trans-science of some sort)
of the eurycosm to explore and explain such things definitively. But
I will attempt to say some useful things on these topics in a later
chapter.

It is worth
reiterating the apparent relevance of morphic eurycosmic dynamics to
human cognitive dynamics:

Principle 22.
Human minds are often so complex with respect to themselves and each
other, that morphic dynamics from the eurycosm play a significant
role in guiding their dynamics, both within physical spacetime and
outside it.

Finally, while human minds are of particular interest to us, since we
are human, it doesn't follow that they are of especial importance in
the overall eurycosm:

Principle 23: It
seems there is a variety of different complex, self-organizing
systems – and a variety of different systems usefully conceivable
as “intelligent” – in the eurycosm. Some of these eurycosmic
minds appear to be quite broad and diffuse in nature, spanning much
larger regions of the eurycosm than something like an individual
human mind. There may even be comprehensive self-organizing,
autopoietic and “mind-like” dynamics across the eurycosm as a
whole, but this is difficult for us to firmly know given our limited
perspectives as humans.

Many individuals, in various “altered” states of consciousness,
have encountered non-human minds evidently resident in some region of
eurycosmic space. Many religious traditions posit the existence of
vastly transhuman eurycosmic minds, including in some cases minds
that span the entire eurycosm (a “Universal Mind”). My attitude
is that each such hypothesis must be considered on its own merits.
On the one hand, human individuals and groups are capable of all
manner of delusions; on the other hand, our ignorance as mere humans
is immense and the eurycosm is almost-doubtless brimming with all
sorts of complex systems we are unable to appreciate, and some that
we can just barely limn, or can perceive only in badly distorted ways
due to our own limitations.

Humanity's lack of a central and unique role in the eurycosm does not
imply that humans are irrelevant or useless in the grand eurycosmic
scheme of things. Just as humans rely on bacteria and various other
micro-organisms to survive and flourish, so may broader, in some
senses “greater” intelligences in the eurycosm rely on “simpler,”
more constrained beings like humans to nourish their own existence.
From a very high level view, one might view constrained structures
like our spacetime continuum (and the minds anchored therein, like
our own) as particular types of “pattern generation engines”
that, in addition to possessing their own intrinsic value, play a
role of ongoingly generating new patterns and casting them out into
the eurycosm, where they may combine with other patterns and play all
sorts of roles beyond human imagination. This tantalizing though
speculative theme will be taken up in a later chapter!

Before ranging too far afield into intriguing speculations, though,
it will be better if I now conclude this first chapter, which
contains my initial attempt to articulate some basic principles
describing the eurycosm in which our physical universe and individual
minds are embedded, and from which they have emerged.

I have presented these principles here without much justification,
but they were not pulled out of thin air (nor pulled directly out of
the eurycosm via “divine inspiration”!); they are grounded in a
variety of theories and observations in disciplines including
physics, parapsychology, biology, philosophy of mind, spiritual and
psychedelic studies, and others. In subsequent chapters I will dig
into some of these connections in more depth; in this chapter I have
opted for a simpler statement of basic ideas, just to give the lay of
the land.

16 comments:

Some folks have asked me (via email etc.) about the testability of these ideas...

As time permits I will post a rigorous mathematical formalization of the ideas in that blog post.... That's kind of easy, just a matter of taking the time to do it....

The framework as outlined in that initial post is kinda too broad to have testable consequences. However, a mathematical formalization will allow one to make additional assumptions that will make the derivation of testable consequences easier.

For instance, where we say

***the distribution of pattern notability tends to be more peaked than one would expect from naïve assumptions of probabilistic independence among different entities.***

this is not quite testable because it doesn't say how much more peaked. But it's not particularly hard to turn this into a testable hypothesis; I just need to think about the most "natural" way to do so...

Giulio said, before blogger ate it:"Re Principle 9 - "some entities in the eurycosm iare going to appear “simpler” , more “surprising”, or more “intense” (i.e. more the subject of focus) than others." - "simple," "surprising" and "intense" are three alternative names for the same thing, right? Is that Pirsig's Quality? Note the typo (iare)."

I think that "Simpler" and "more surprising" can be considered synonymous in a sense. Surprising can be taken to mean "having more information", but if one uses some sort of Occam prior in measuring relative information, then this works out the same as simplicity really...

"Intense" is a different notion, and the proportionality between intensity and simplicity/surprisingness is a metaphysical or transpersonal-psychological assertion rather than a mathematical assertion...

Thanks Ben! But this is not The Post Blogger Ate - I deleted it because reading on I found that "simple," "surprising" and "intense" are different things. But it's good to see that they are related. To me, "more intense" and "more surprising" are related (if something has little information it can't be that intense).

For some reasons Pirsig's Quality keeps coming to my mind reading about "simple," "surprising" and "intense."

The rest of the eaten post was about parallels with Kant's Ding an Sich (The Thing Itself), Prigogine's idea that irreversible change (intensity?) is more fundamental than spacetime, and Abraham/Roy's book mentioned here:http://turingchurch.com/2015/11/28/the-quest-for-akashic-physics/

Hey man ... the Beef is coming when I get time ... I'm pretty busy with more practical stuff so writing this kind of thing only occurs in spare moments (as fun and, I think, ultimately valuable as these sorts of ideas are...)

Maybe Pirsig's Quality is something like the Peircean Firstness of especially simple/surprising/intense entities/experiences...

One more comment in response to some discussion on Facebook -- actually this essay kinda began as an effort to articulate a suitably abstract setting in which to posit "Principle 18: A characteristic of the eurycosm, or at least of large portions of the eurycosm within which humans have tended to exist, is that the distribution of pattern notability tends to be more peaked than one would expect from naïve assumptions of probabilistic independence among different entities. " -- i.e. my abstracted form of Rupert Sheldrake 's morphic field hypothesis and Peirce's "tendency to take habits" ...

I wanted to lift the morphic-field/tendency-to-take-habits hypothesis outside the spacetime continuum, so it could be used as part of the explanation for the emergence/existence of the spacetime continuum...

If metaphysics scares you, think of it as euryphysics -- a kind of physics, but of a wider kind of universe than conventional physics deals with so far. Maybe euryphysics is to QM as QM is to classical physics ;)

Comparing to my own views, most of the differences that I have are in the first three (0, 1, and 2) principles. After that, I either agree or agree with the inverse of the principle because I am looking at physical appearances as a function of sensory gaps or inequalities within some perceptual frame. In my view, machines ride on the universality of the gaps in sense and present a reflection of sense from a perspectiveless ‘outside’ rather than containing authentic experiences of their own.

//Principle 0: In dealing with subtle matters like the nature of mind and reality, it is best to avoid absolutist attitudes, and to consider concepts and entities as they appear in the perspective of some particular observer or some particular class of observers.//

Agree with the exception of the status of sense itself. I consider it absolutely impossible for anything to ‘exist’ in any way which is neither sensed nor sensible. I don’t like the term ‘observers’ and favor ‘participants’ or ‘frame of perceptual-participation’ instead.

//Principle 1: The physical spacetime continuum in which we perceive ourselves as living, while in our normal waking state of consciousness, is best viewed as a subset of a larger realm.//

Agree. I see spacetime as an abstraction and inversion that should actually refer to natural phenomena which can be ‘spaced’ and timed, i.e. measured as having a position or causal context. This is an area which I think is ripe for discovery, with specific connections to time dilation/distance contraction, Electric permittivity and magnetic permeability (or rather their inverse, since a universal sensory-motor primitive would supply infinite permittivity and permeability, spaced-matter and timed mass-energy would be understood as the ‘metric tension’ of sense defining limited limitation on itself). Contextuality and non-locality properties of QM can similarly be used to define time and space as emergent properties of the context-selecting, locality-realizing pan-sense primitive. Quantum phenomena should be understood as literally ‘only partially real’, or the bridge between the contextualizing-realizing primitive and the spaced-timed context which has been publicly realized in Classical Cartesian-Newtonian terms.

//Principle 2: “Consciousness”, in the sense of raw awareness, is best understood as a quality that can be an aspect of any entity in the eurycosm.//

Here I would turn the tables on ‘entity’ and suggest that there can be no such thing outside of consciousness. Sense, as the sole and universal qualifier would be necessary to define any quality or set of qualities that constitute an entity.

Hmmm... whether consciousness is an aspect of everything, or OTOH consciousness is the infrastructure/ground of everything, feels like more of a semantic distinction to me. I.e. as mathematical models these two perspectives are isomorphic, it would seem...

The ambitious endeavor you have embarked on here is as unfathomably fascinating as its topic, Ben. Thank you for sharing it this way with other seekers.

Whether through repeatable tests or otherwise, the proof of this pudding of puddings too will be in high quality verifications. For even though there can be great value and beauty in ideas that provide powerful emotional and intellectual satisfaction, we value even more whether what we suspect to be true is actually true or not. The potency of veracity cannot be overstated.

Years ago during the discourse among the aspiring cosmic engineers of the fledgling 'Order of Cosmic Engineers' you testified to having had a few numinous experiences that deeply impressed you and which you could not explain through what we know so far of physics. You believe(d) these experiences to be tantalizing glimpses of what you presently coin the eurycosmos or perhaps encounters with (aspects of) eurycosmic, transnatural entities extant within it.

In that discourse we —you and I— agreed as to the objective reality of the experiences you referenced. We disagreed as to whether your interpretation of their eurycosmic nature was accurate. I suggested that these undeniably real experiences might have been wholly and extremely local in the sense that they were produced by and contained in their entirety within your brain... without extending beyond —this word is certainly appropriate here— your meninges or skull.

In other words, I questioned your interpretation of your experiences as actual observations of, manifestations of, encounters with, interactions with (aspects of) the eurycosmos or with transnatural entities / realities.

Accordingly, I warmly encourage any and all attempts at thinking out of the box with regard to reasonably credible *verifications* —somehow someway— of hypotheses of manifestations of, encounters with, interactions with (aspects of) the eurycosmos or with eurycosmic, transnatural entities / realities.

Skeptical doubting Thomases are real too. They will reasonably expect extraordinarily compelling and credible the verifications of extraordinary claim of the reality of the eurycosmos. They don't want to believe, they want to know, to find out, to experience it for themselves.

I wish you the greatest of success in this endeavor too, Ben. I will be most interested in tracking your progress with this, and hope to be of some assistance as a sounding board, an occasional, constructive Devil's advocate, and otherwise.

Hi Phillipe, thanks for the comments! Actually, convincing or entertaining skeptical Doubting Thomas's is not particularly interesting or important to me. The reality of psi is IMO pretty well established, and the majority of the human race understands the real but slippery/odd nature of psi, so the fact that a certain percentage of the community maintains a skeptical attitude is a cultural-psychological peculiarity that is of peripheral interest to me.

I am however, very interested personally in deriving dramatic practical, observable, experience-able implications from these ideas -- not just in spinning out abstract concepts. My hope is to go from concepts to mathematics to concrete predictions to compelling demonstrations. But whether these demonstrations convince hard-boiled skeptics -- who cares.... (As my dad always says, "science advances one funeral at a time" ;p .... Which may pose some difficulties as we cure mortality -- but I digress!)

As comments here cannot be edited after publication, the sentence starting with "They will reasonably expect... " should have read: They will reasonably expect extraordinarily compelling and credible verifications of the extraordinary claim of the reality of the eurycosmos."